"Three Quarters" or 750GB Hard Disk Drives Roundup

This roundup includes solutions from all companies making 750GB hard disk drives these days: Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital. We will discuss features and performance of 10 hard drives with 750GB storage capacity.

Three quarters of a terabyte – is it much or not? We guess it is quite a lot of storage space, especially for a single hard disk, even considering the rapid growth of data amounts. Such a disk can store as many as thirty Blu-ray movies, which is the best consumer video format with outstanding quality. As for storing music and photos, the numbers are going to be just huge. Thus, a 750GB hard disk drive is a universal storage on which you can install your OS and applications as well as keep your home collections of video, audio and photo materials. The cost of storage with HDDs has declined so much that the HDD is now competitive to optical discs in this parameter.

Seagate was the first company to offer a 750GB hard disk drive. It was the superb four-platter model from the Barracuda 7200.10 series. We dedicated a special review to that drive in the fall of that year. Every other company has not only introduced its own 750GB model since then but also released a 1-terabyte drive, reaching a new milestone in terms of storage capacity. The recording density per platter has been steadily increasing, too. The above-mentioned Barracuda 7200.10 had a recording density of 187.5GB per platter whereas modern HDDs have reached a density of 320GB per platter. 375GB platters are already looming in the horizon. So, while the first generation of 750GB drives had four platters, the newer models are based on only three. Talking about the current situation and the close perspective, 1000GB drives are nothing special already and have already declined in price (and the prices of HDDs of smaller capacities have declined even more). The next round of the race is about to begin as Seagate has already announced its ability to introduce 1.5TB drives.

So, it is time to find the highs and lows of the HDDs available today. We have discussed 1TB drives recently, and now we want to deal with 750GB ones. Writing a comparative review is not easy as there are always new products appearing on the market. Once you collect enough material, a new model pops up and another is about to be released. Therefore some newest models are missing in this review, yet we tried to cover as many HDDs as we could.

A 750GB drive is not the largest available, but it is cheaper than a 1TB drive while its capacity should suffice for most applications. So, this storage capacity is all right, but what about speed? You’ll find this out right now.